Ils ne regrettent rien

Jean-François Kahn asked what was the big deal about DSK’s alleged assault on a hotel maid – it’s just a “troussage domestique” – lifting the maid’s skirt, a tussle with the help, you know the kind of thing.

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20 Responses to “Ils ne regrettent rien”

I was actually more struck by a section in one of the articles you linked earlier.

Why, asked some critics, when she made her allegations on a television show several years ago, was Banon not questioned further about her memorable tale of “a rutting chimpanzee”? Why, when journalists knew that the Socialist MP Aurélie Filipetti made arrangements never to be “left alone in a room with him”, was nothing more ever said?

Recalling now our priapic president, WJC, who regularly received a pass when making passes on the job, courtesy of liberals and feminists of the convenient, occasional kind. Serial sexual predator-harasser meets with enabling silence from those who need his political clout. At least GWB, for all his conspicuous failings, didn’t see low-status working women as a buffet line, and for that I have to allow a begrudging one-up. The French have their mode of hypocrisy and we have ours, it seems.

This really passes intelligibility! Not one word for the suffering of the maid, but all this angst over the “suffering” of poor old DSK. And they caught him at the airport trying to leave the country. It’s not as though he didn’t know that he had crossed over a very important line, and deserved to be punished. Of course he did. That’s why he ran. So having all this sympathy expressed for a sexual predator is really too much!

Mr Strauss-Kahn, he said, was a “libertine” who enjoyed the “pleasures of the flesh” but this was not tolerated in a “puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism”.

Gilles Savary and his and his compatriots (including the appropriately initialled JFK) will be delighted to learn that this sort of rape apologetic exists on this side of the pond, taking the form of “boys will be boys”.

After reading Ben Stein’s arguments (I won’t dignify him with a link), I am convinced Ian MacDougall is completely right in his comment above; nothing brings men of different backgrounds and politics together than the defence of their common privilege.

These loathsome things can imagine being in DSK’s place, he’s another wealthy man after all. But they don’t even seem to consider the working class woman might even have a point of view, let alone try to empathize with her.

Say what you like about Anglo-Saxon hyposcrisy but no UK equivalent of these guys – the editor of the New Statesman, say, or a controversial philosopher (Eagleton perhaps would be the equivalent of B H Levy?) would come out with anything resemblng this kind of indifferent dismissal of the victim of sexual asault. Even Assange defenders wouldn’t play down an attack on an immigrant chambermaid. There are some allegeds in those sentences.

Except that Eagleton isn’t a philosopher. He fancies himself one, but that’s a reason not to let him. Maybe Ted Honderich. BHL is way more of a media don though, but there probably just is no Anglphone equivalent of that.

Anyway…I don’t know…People said disgusting things about Assange’s accusers, and then there’s what Ben Stein said about DSK’s, so I’m not so sure. (Mind you, I can still barely believe Stein said what he said.)

There isn’t really an equivalent of BHL in the UK. The best known intellectuals would probably be Germaine Greer and Richard Dawkins – not philosophers as such. GG is quite capable of saying something barmy on any subject. I think though the alleged victim’s position and status would make her a bit less open to slagging off by the bien pensants than some Swedish women.

One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.

The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.

This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is the reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is, unfortunately, not a joke.)